Slavery in the Capitol's Shadow
Protecting rights abroad, ignoring them here
Minimum wage, health insurance, room and board--When Dora Mortey was recruited as a domestic servant for a professional family in Washington, D.C., she gratefully anticipated a life she could only imagine in her native Ghana. It wasn't long, however, before Mortey concluded that her American dream was nothing but that. In a lawsuit filed against her employer in August, Mortey says she was paid just $100 a month and forced to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. She was told, she says, that if she went outside she could be kidnapped or raped. She says her employer called her "The Creature."
Mortey was no illegal immigrant working off a debt to a ruthless snakehead, a criminal who holds immigrants as virtual prisoners while they pay off their passage. Instead, Mortey came to America legally, under a visa program that lets foreign employees of international organizations bring in domestic help. Her complaint is distinguished by a harsh irony: Her employer, who has denied the charges, was an engineer with the World Bank, an organization whose central mission is to alleviate poverty.
Cheap labor. Each year, foreign nationals at embassies and international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations bring over about 4,000 workers to clean their homes and care for their children. For the most part, the organizations say, these workers are treated well. But Mortey's case adds to a growing number of lawsuits charging that domestic helpers are being exploited by the very people entrusted with fighting labor abuses around the globe. Joy Zarembka of the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers Rights says her group has documented scores of cases over the past few years. Now, the Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate the problem, and Congress is expected to take up the matter next year. Says Zarembka: "Modern-day slavery is happening right here in the shadow of the nation's capitol."
Bringing over domestic help is a longstanding perk for employees of the World Bank, which promotes development in the Third World. Typically well educated and well paid, senior World Bank employees want domestics who share their nationality and language. But such workers offer more than the ability to blend in with their host families culturally; even when paid a legal wage, they offer huge savings over what an American worker, or even an illegal immigrant, would command.
To be sure, some complaints of abuse amount to wage disputes. And many problems stem from miscommunication or cultural misunderstandings. Compensation is relative: An illegal wage in America may be a fortune in a worker's impoverished homeland, and luxury housing here may replace a one-room shanty there. Nevertheless, employers of these foreign workers must abide by all the labor laws of this country. And in too many instances, critics say, they are breaking them.
Olgica Petrovic is a Yugoslavian nurse who claims that her host couple, both senior employees of the World Bank in Washington, D.C., rarely allowed her outside, telling her she would be deported. Although she earned the minimum wage of $220 per week caring for the wife's ailing mother, Petrovic says she worked seven days a week with just four hours off on an occasional weekend. Meanwhile, she was housed in the posh Watergate condominums pending renovation of the family's $700,000 home.
The couple, Sonja and Vidoje Brajovic, deny the charges. "[Petrovic] is not an unintelligent person," says their lawyer, Gary Howard Simpson. "I would imagine that she could have walked out the door anytime she wanted." He said Petrovic was "discharged over performance issues" and added that the Brajovics even bought her an airplane ticket so she could return to Belgrade. World Bank spokesman John Donaldson declined to comment on this or similar cases the bank's ethics office reviews each year. But, he said, "we have a policy of zero tolerance for abuse."
World Bank employees are not the only foreigners accused of exploiting the visa program. In a lawsuit settled last April, Shamela Begum of Bangladesh claims she was "essentially enslaved" by a high-ranking official of the Bahraini Mission to the United Nations and his wife. Begum says the wife, Khatun Saleh, hit her on the head with a glass and, in another incident, caused her to burn her arm on the stove. She says she was paid $800 for 10 months, during which time she left the Salehs' Manhattan apartment exactly twice. The Salehs have denied the charges.
Such allegations raise questions about the responsibility of the U.S. government to prevent labor abuse. The FBI is investigating the Saleh case as a criminal matter, U.S. News has learned. Yet the State Department argued during the civil trial that the case should be dismissed. The department said the Salehs enjoyed diplomatic immunity, meaning they could not be prosecuted for acts committed on American soil unless their own country waived immunity.
Sharing the blame. Closer monitoring by the government, critics say, might have prevented the case of Mary Chumo and Alice Benjo, two Kenyan women who recently filed a federal lawsuit claiming they were falsely imprisoned by Elizabeth Belsoi, a secretary at the Kenyan Embassy. Caring for three young children in the secretary's suburban Maryland home, the women say they were often on duty from 6 a.m. to midnight. Benjo says Belsoi once made her vacuum the house at 1 a.m. "We suffered a lot," says Benjo, who left the home in August.
Through her attorney, Belsoi denies the charges and says she abided by the terms of the employment contract. But Benjo's lawyer, Edward Leavy, says the government must share blame for a contract he says was flawed to begin with. "What imbecile at the State Department would allow [a secretary] to bring in [these] workers and think that she could pay them?" asks Leavy, who has represented dozens of exploited workers over the past decade. In fact, says Steven Smitson of CASA of Maryland, an advocacy group for domestic workers, the State Department often grants visas that have laid out illegal wage rates--sometimes two or three times less than an illegal immigrant could make. The State Department has implemented new regulations to help ensure that domestic workers receive a "fair and living" wage.
Under pressure from activists, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have also instituted reforms of the domestic-worker program, including orientation sessions, audits, and better procedures to investigate complaints. The IMF has brought in a former military judge and deputy inspector general of the CIA to run its ethics office. But advocates also want independent monitors like those who protect child-care workers known as au pairs. The au pair program is not without flaws, but William Gustafson, director of an au pair monitoring group, says many problems are prevented because families see the monitors frequently. "They know we are watching them," he says. The domestic-worker program, Zarembka says, could use a close eye, too.
This story appears in the November 13, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.